At the end of the day, customers are not relieved of the need to do their own due diligence. When it comes down to it, cloud providers are building their clouds with the same stuff customers are building their data centers with, so the same failure scenarios still exist. Sure a cloud provider can theoretcially mitigate them to a greter degree, but not completely eliminate them.

If we look at drawing an analog to WAN transport, the odds are if your WAN access to your data center is critical, you will buy transport from more than one SP and get alternate wire center service from your local carrier. Until we get to a point where we have things like inter-cloud protability and the like so we can build system redundancy instead of depending on component infallibiltiy, the risk will continue to exist.

Damn straight. You can run whatever availability numbers you like, but that downtime on the cloud provider side will sound a hell of a lot worse then down time in the old internal IT department. The cloud provider won't win trying to say, well I still have better up time then you could with an in house solution.

Why? Because the cloud provider came in and made the case that his economies of scale would lower costs while providing an infrastructure internal IT can't match. Because I switched to the cloud provider over other solutions because I thought it would be better (cost/availability/whatever [no one's buying the security advantage yet if they have firing neurons]).

It can be looked at either way down the road depending on the perception of the customer. When the cloud provider goes down 400 blog posts go up, so there's no place to hide. On the other hand the local IT guy can get a lot of local attention if his systems availability goes down at an inopportune time. But the guy marketing his cloud is newer, the switch or consideration thereof fresh, and lame excuses won't hold water when its fresh in your mind.

And the blame the customer approach "you should have done your due diligence" won't get very far either. Everyone know there will be garbage vendors along with the good ones, but last I checked Amazon and Google aren't giving guided tours of their data centers and aren't those garbage vendors.